Protestant monarchs respectively, had vigorously affirmed the right of subjects to resist tyrannical
princes, and their writings supplied Sir Robert with abundant material for controversy.
Sir Robert Filmer was knighted by Charles I, and his house is said to have been plundered by the
Parliamentarians ten times. He thinks it not unlikely that Noah sailed up the Mediterranean and
allotted Africa, Asia, and Europe to Ham, Shem, and Japheth respectively. He held that, by the
English Constitution, the Lords only give counsel to the king, and the Commons have even less
power; the king, he says, alone makes the laws, which proceed solely from his will. The king,
according to Filmer, is perfectly free from all human control, and cannot be bound by the acts of
his predecessors, or even by his own, for "impossible it is in nature that a man should give a law
unto himself."
Filmer, as these opinions show, belonged to the most extreme section of the Divine Right party.
Patriarcha begins by combating the "common opinion" that "mankind is naturally endowed and
born with freedom from all subjection, and at liberty to choose what form of government it please,
and the power which any one man hath over others was at first bestowed according to the
discretion of the multitude." "This tenet," he says, "was first hatched in the schools." The truth,
according to him, is quite different; it is, that originally God bestowed the kingly power upon
Adam, from whom it descended to his heirs, and ultimately reached the various monarchs of
modern times. Kings now, he assures us, "either are, or are to be reputed, the next heirs to those
first progenitors who were at first the natural parents of the whole people." Our first parent, it
seems, did not adequately appreciate his privilege as universal monarch, for "the desire of liberty
was the first cause of the fall of Adam." The desire of liberty is a sentiment which Sir Robert
Filmer regards as impious.
The claims made by Charles I, and by his protagonists on his behalf, were in excess of what earlier
times would have conceded to kings. Filmer points out that Parsons, the English Jesuit, and
Buchanan, the Scotch Calvinist, who agree in almost nothing else, both maintain that sovereigns
can be deposed by the people for misgovernment. Parsons, of course, was thinking of the
Protestant Queen Elizabeth, and Buchanan of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots. The doctrine of